Thursday, 8 November 2012

Blackheath Caverns

Ever since last spring we have been meaning feature an
article in the April edition of that wonderful publication ‘Subterrania’ –
the article is‘Chalk Mining near
Blackheath Hill, Southeast London. Including Jack Cade's Cavern’ by Anthony
Durham

Ostensibly it is yet another account of the caverns known to
lie under Blackheath Hill but the author does raise some interesting points and
tries to examine the subject holistically.However, to begin at the beginning – he says ‘ten years ago I had very little
idea what lies under the ground near my home. But that all changed on 7
April2002, when the A2 main road
through Greenwichcollapsed into a big
hole halfway up Blackheath Hill’.Having
opened up his interest he began to look furtherand discovered more.

He started offering guided tours of where the holes were but
met with problems because of his unqualified status. He also contacted the authors of a
local blog about Underground Greenwich and says they helped him.He says he read Harry Pearman's important work in Vol 6
of the Chelsea Speleological Society – but doesn’t indicate that he has everspoken to Harry, which is a real pity (Harry
has published a more recent article on the caverns in Vol.44).

Returning to the 2002 A2 collapse he says ‘Transport for
London and Thames Water were essentially
gifted a get-out-of-jail- free card by a plausible story that the lime burners
of three hundred years ago were a bunch of cowboys who repeatedly caused
trouble to the road managers of that time’- I hope that isn’t referring to my
rather shoved together talks on it – I am certain I never mentioned the word
‘cowboys’ , although I might have my doubts about the level of care and honesty
exhibited by 17th quarry workers – although Anthony Durham is ’inclined
to stand up for those old lime burners near Greenwich, whose engineering and
managerial skills, and respect for thelocal community’ should not be under-estimated.

He gives the much quoted note about the activities of the Steers
family ‘In 1677 William Steers, Limebumer, was fined £40 for "not filling
up, supporting and making good, safe, and secure the King's Highway there against his
Lime Kilns leading from Deptford to Blackheath, which said highway he hath
undermined by digging, taking and carrying from thence great quantities of chalk’ and so on.
He pictures the Steers family ‘earning their living for generations on a patch
of hillside that nobody much cared about, selling lime for rich people to build
houses’

Returning to the 2002 collapse he discussed the spring line on
Blackheath and the consultants' report paid for by Transport for London which explained
that ‘most subsidence events are caused by water transporting soil particles
underground and opening up ever-bigger voids, which finally collapse.’But then he says ‘Unfortunately the report
did a rotten job on the specific conditions of Blackheath Hill’ and adds that ‘little
is known in detail about mining techniques used around Blackheath, even as late
as the 1800s’. he says ‘While digging
into a hillside without modem machinery, miners will tend to create a vertical
cliff or quarry workface with a horizontal area in front that is partly the
floor of the digging and partly the top of a spoil heap’ and that ‘mining
tended to transform hillsides’ . He then looks at the area around the hill and
the landscape of cliffs and craters- he
is quite right, go out and look at it!He asks ‘ how far those steps are man-made’

With reference to ‘Jack Cade's Cavern’ he discusses its exact position and how it might be located by the casual
passer by – but asks not to ‘pester (residents) in search of their
underground cavity.’

As he points out the Cavern ‘has led an eventful life over
the centuries, having been lost, found, lost, found, and lost’ – and gives a brief history,
including the inspection of it as a potential second world war air raid shelter .... ‘They found it exactly as their Victorian
forebears had left it: graffiti, old bottles and all.’

He goes on to discuss some of the Blackheath lime burners
and has unearthed some interestingmaterial from the Morden College archives. Has found other Steers –
including a Liverpudlian ‘England’s first major civil engineer’ leading him to
speculate ‘that Blackheath Hill was the real nursery of British Engineering’. It’s easy for
me to say ‘ of course it was’ – but Penn’s and their followers/trainees were really mechanical engineers –and I
am not sure where we fit Perkins and his steam guns tests into this

He says, rightly, ‘Blackheath Hill is a whole landscape of
industrial archaeology’ - and it is so
well hidden by modern buildings and the traffic.

Read the article – and I would like to get Anthony Durham
along to talk to GIHS sometime

1 comment:

Mechanical engineers were included with civil engineers until halfway through the 19th century. The IMechE was founded in 1847 because it was only then that mechanicals thought they were different enough. Until then 'civils' were so called mainly to distinguish themselves from military engineers. So it would be quite natural for what we now call civil engineers to diversify into what we think of as the separate technology of mechanical engineering.